Student assignments, generically called “classwork” or “homework”, represent for most teachers and students the bulk of their work. When students do their homework they are learning to use and understand the concepts that are being taught. It is a widely held belief among educators that homework is the key to success for nearly all students. However, in the vast majority of the cases, the assignments are the same for every student in the class and are typically focused on the average student in the class. This “standardized” assignment process has three inherent problems.
First, it treats every student in the class in the same way and does not differentiate between students. Some are doing above average work and already know how to do the homework problems and will be wasting their time doing the assignment and are likely bored by it. Others are doing below average work and do not understand the problems they are supposed to do, and they are often frustrated by the assignment. The students who are left will find the assignment “just right”, and they will actually learn from doing the “homework”. Because assignments are not treated adaptively and individually, education is often very inefficient and often the majority of students may well find the homework irrelevant and frustrating.
Second, assignments are given during class periods and typically done as evening homework. The homework will then be handed in the next day and will not be returned to the student until the following day, under optimal conditions. This long feedback loop between lesson presentation, assignment, actual student work, grading the work, returning the work to the student, the student going over the work and finally asking and receiving necessary help can take a week or longer meaning that the assignment will likely fail in its primary mission to help students learn from each assignment in order to progress to the next one. This can be the case even for those students who are at the right level.
Third, every student does the same number of problems without regard to their learning or understanding. This takes the locus of control away from the student. It does not matter if the student is concentrating or not, if the student is really trying to learn or not, if the student already knows the subject or not. The student gets the same number of problems to do. In short, students are required to do a fixed set of problems irrespective of what they need and thus have no ability to control their learning. Assignments are thus not related to real learning or a concept of mastery, but instead are deemed “busy work”. It is thus common practice for students to postpone “real learning” until they have to study for a test.
Previous attempts to address these problems using computer technology have used pre-testing to adapt assignments to student abilities. Such pre-tests are used by the computer to define the concepts a student needs to work on. Typically such concepts represent many homework assignments and not individual problems, because pre-tests represent a substantial amount of time and effort and can be applied to only large scale adaptations of content.
The other method that has previously been tried applied a “branching” methodology or tree structures to select problems for students to do based on their previous answers. Such “tree structures” require problems that have been previously classified by difficulty and by type such that the problem itself has “intelligence” with branches for each possible answer coded into the problem script. This method is often used for placement tests and educational software that claims to be “artificially intelligent”. The method has the inherent weakness that the problems used must have their difficulty level previously established by some method, and thus only problems that have been statistically validated can be used. It further requires that the educators who construct the trees look at all of the possible student responses and provide pre-determined paths through the content. While this process may work for tests, it is far too difficult to be used successfully for 10,000 or more problems typically used in a semester long high school or college course in mathematics and other subjects. It is also severely limited in the types of problems that can be presented, requiring the pre-building of complete sequences or tree structures of concepts and problems that each student traversed in their own individual way based on their answers to problems.